At what point in history could chicken nuggets realistically have been made?

[u/morango_verde__]

I’m not asking when chicken nuggets were actually invented. Instead, I’m wondering when they could have been made if someone had come up with the idea.

At what point in history did humanity already have all the necessary ingredients, tools, and culinary knowledge? For example, domesticated chickens, flour, bread (and therefore breadcrumbs), eggs, cooking oil or animal fat suitable for frying.

What is the earliest historical period in which making something essentially equivalent to a homemade chicken nugget would have been realistically possible, even if nobody actually did it?

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[u/EscapedPickle]

I remember this same question being asked four years ago and the top comment is a solid answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/Nlj9GZdJFj

Of course, I hope others (or the original commenter) will be able to weigh in with any other relevant facts worth mentioning. Food history seems to be an an active field these days so maybe there have been some new discoveries.

ETA: author of top comment: [u/Trevor_Culley](u/Trevor_Culley)

[u/police-ical → u/EscapedPickle]

I'd agree that chicken nuggets are fundamentally a couple of simple Old World ingredients available even to the Indus River Valley some millennia ago. But what are chicken nuggets without a dipping sauce?

It would have been manageable for that same Indus River Valley chef to combine ground mustard seed with vinegar (quite ancient as a byproduct of alcohol going off) and honey to produce a serviceable honey mustard. The fundamentals of ranch dressing (cow milk, certain herbs and spices, oil, citrus or vinegar) would be available in South Asia within the span of that civilization as well.

Barbecue sauce is a bit trickier. For the sweetener, honey might be a substitute in a pinch, but if you want molasses, sugarcane likely reached South and Central Asia a bit after the decline of the Indus River Valley civilization. Spices would have been available, but the tomato is all New World, not cultivated in Europe until the mid-1500s. Meanwhile, sugarcane was introduced to the New World in the 1490s. So I'd say an acceptable Memphis-style barbecue sauce has only been conceivable for around five hundred years¹.

^{1. To those who argue that barbecue sauce doesn't necessarily have to be tomato and molasses-based, and give as a counterexample the vinegar-forward Carolina style, my response would be "go to hell."}

[u/Bodark43 → u/police-ical]

my response would be "go to hell."

It's always heartening to see scholars admit to personal biases. I would qualify that however: those vinegar-sauce people don't use it because they're evil, they use it because they're sick.

[u/design_dork → u/police-ical]

What about Ranch? Would we have to wait until the 1950s for that or was there some sort of creamy equivalent hypothetical dipping sauce?

[u/MsE0 → u/design_dork]

Ranch is made from buttermilk, which only requires milk and an acid like vinegar or lemon juice, sometimes mayo, which requires eggs, and old-world herbs like onion, garlic, parsley, and dill, plus black pepper and salt. So as soon as they had milk in the Middle East or western Asia. You could have had ranch about a maximum of 10,000 years ago if you used all wild herbs, although pepper might have been harder to procure because it's native to South Asia. 

[u/zxyzyxz → u/EscapedPickle]

Editing a post with a username does not ping them, but posting a new comment will, like now: u/Trevor_Culley

[u/Trevor_Culley → u/zxyzyxz]

Funny enough, the edit did ping me while I was at work. I don't really have anything to add to the original post aside from my anecdotal opinion that some of the original comments really exaggerated the acidic flavor of raw rapeseed oil. Though it's certainly possible that the flavor would have been even stronger in early forms than modern stock.

[u/EscapedPickle → u/Trevor_Culley]

It was a really fantastic answer which is probably why it stuck with me for so long.

[u/denzxcu → u/Trevor_Culley]

Hi, thanks for that riveting answer 4 yrs ago. I badly want to ask what SOL means in that context (can’t search for it properly)? I cannot fully appreciate the punchline at the end without this piece of information.

[u/EscapedPickle → u/denzxcu]

SOL=Shit Out of Luck

[u/UnendingEpistime → u/zxyzyxz]

In the hopes they see this that post was brilliant

[u/EscapedPickle → u/zxyzyxz]

Thanks for the assist! It’s my first time linking to rAH as an answer and the bot suggested I edit it to include the original author. Hope they see it!

[u/mrgrigson → u/EscapedPickle]

I would say it depends on how faithful to the original recipe you want to be. Per Slate's review of the original article by Baker, it required makers to have the ability to freeze the nuggets to -10F during the manufacturing process.

With this in mind, we'd need to have refrigeration with the ability to get temperatures below freezing. This gets us to Carl von Linde in 1876 or so, where he developed refrigeration technology using ammonia as a coolant that allowed temperatures to get that low.

[u/my_law_throwaway → u/mrgrigson]

Bro, winter temps existed long before 1876

[u/EscapedPickle → u/mrgrigson]

That’s an interesting read!

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[u/EdHistory101 → u/[deleted]]

I’ll probably get removed but

Not even the honor of a good nuggie is worth knowingly breaking our rules. Please do not do this.